The crit: level 5 Year 2

Have just finished two solid days of crits. This time with second year BA Fine Art.

These are particularly interesting sessions. Students are about six weeks into the course and they are starting to establish personal directions. Some of them I met for the first time last week when I came in to hold tutorials, so I’m aware that I have to be careful I don’t repeat myself.

It’s the first crit of the year, so a reminder of the ‘rules of the game’ are given. Twenty minutes each, no more than five minutes for individual student presentations and no one to be negatively critical. This should be an experience about potential and possibilities, but first of all it should be about each individual owning the experience and helping the group in directing the focus of the crit into fruitful areas. Therefore everyone reads the crit text, (similar to the one I posted earlier) before the crits start as a reminder of some of the issues they may try and deal with.

Practice is pretty wide, from performance to painting, through traditional sculpture to film making, each group is composed of six students.

The particular mix of students and disciplines can lead to very different approaches. For instance one afternoon session was dominated by painters. This led to a much tighter group involvement.  One key theme that was dealt with was how does anybody start to develop an individual practice? Painting is not as ubiquitous as it used to be, but it seems to me that interest is returning. Joseph Beuys’s comment when walking through the old Vernon Street studios of, “Painting, painting, everywhere I see painting”, not being as true now perhaps as then but the reality underlying his comment still persists. Why continue to do it? Why continue to use an age old method of making images in a digital world?

There were two camps, one where the painters were coming from a very abstract position, developing personal approaches to colour, form, application etc. and one student coming from a figurative tradition. The more abstract people presented before the figurative painter; one other student was engaged in social sculpture, but he was pretty interested in painting himself, so once his crit was finished (he was first on) he engaged with everyone else’s with enthusiasm.

This particular session is of interest to me because it is very easy for me to compare and contrast it to a session from thirty-five years ago. A particular language would have been used then and the job of the tutor would have been to show how it worked and point out ‘failures’ in its application. It would have been assumed that painting was a valid occupation and that formal issues were central to the debate.

This session starts with students introducing their approaches. Student one has painted large swathes of colour bands, which he calls roads. One orange, painted through a stencil onto paper, about five feet in height, the ‘road’ of colour approximately one foot six to two feet wide. This is a single layer application of a mid orange, occasionally flecks of white showing through, bottom edge sharp, top edge ragged. One gestural mark cuts it in the centre. This is done with a stick of charcoal, the mark having a slight curve, so it looks as if it’s done ‘from the shoulder’.  The other image consists of three ‘roads’ of colour, all vertical of the same width as before. This time two dark green stripes frame a yellow one which is in tone very close to the paper support. This time the green bands are modulated and there is more visual texture. No single mark, just the three vertical bands of colour.

The student has much more work in his studio at home, work requiring much patience seems to go on there. For instance he describes a painting with a gesso ground which he has sanded and re-laid several times. However we can only really respond to what is in front of us, but his description makes us aware of his ability to craft and maintain focus.

The first issue is this use of the term ‘road’. He is searching for what he calls an ‘honest mark’. I introduce the road outside into the argument. How honest is the yellow line painted by the council? Is this as honest as the black rubber lines made by skid marks? What constitutes authenticity? This engages the others; he shows a drawing done in anger after a fall-out with a girlfriend. Some students feel this is really ‘authentic’. The single line dashed off across the orange slab is apparently of a similar character. We struggle to find ways in to this. I point out the emotive drawing is on A1 and this is about the same size as a torso and we could look at this drawing as a punch-bag.  A receptacle for anger venting, marks as a result of striking an imaginary torso.  This seems to echo or chime with something. I open out the embodied mind hypothesis. Trying to ground the meaning in direct physical experience, a more phenomenological approach.

Something about the way colour is talked about makes me realise that these students have not had an old fashioned Foundation course. I ask them all to stare at the orange slab, let their eyes defocus for about three minutes and wait for the blue afterimage to start glowing around the orange edge. Then once it appears to shift their vision to one side of the orange. They do this and are amazed, one student thinks it’s like having an imaginary door open.  Such a simple thing, but something that needs pointing out in order to take it on board, now we can start talking colour experience more precisely. How are warms mediated by cools? What sort of neutral is this or that? We start looking at other paintings around. Where does the moment of ‘life’ or energy come from? This is an old debate, which I was fascinated to find being re-thought within a very post-post-modern environment, also lots of debate as to when one colour might start moving off ‘centre’ and how afterimages from simultaneous contrasts could be used to generate optical movement.

The crit returns to the emotional issues surrounding the break-up. A relationship can take a long time to build, you become familiar with the other person and then in one brief moment it can all fall apart. Can we approach a painting’s development in the same way? Perhaps days of careful preparation, sanding, priming, layering etc. careful glazing and undercoating, all blasted away by paint being splattered or thrown or dumped on the surface,or paint being applied thoughtlessly or badly?

Eventually we move on. The next student has made a variety of approaches to painting, some very gestural, some colour squares looking for his ‘colour’ combinations, a ‘palette’ of wood consisting of a plywood off-cut about four feet long and nine inches wide, a roll of wall-paper, gestures running up and down it, a single squiggle of blue moving along the centre, making a sharp contrast with warmer paint gestures below. He also has a large charcoal drawing, which one of the other students is very engaged with. Again what comes out of the introduction is this search for a personal language. The student is one I had a tutorial with last week and I had suggested he was getting over complicated, that he should focus on one clear issue at a time, be it colour, form, application, surface etc. He had done the colour square painting as a response to this and felt he had ‘found’ some of his colours.

Again this issue of authenticity, I suggest once you are lost in the process you don’t worry about it. The search for personal approaches to colour is interesting and we focus on this. The question as to where our colour sensibility comes from is debated. Is it forged by early years’ experiences, like the colour of the nursery wallpaper, dad’s car, the landscape you grew up in? Is it culturally specific? Is it something from nature or nurture? I suggest one approach is to look for the colours you hate. Love and hate are very close emotionally and perhaps what you find as a young painter is that no matter how hard you mix, you can never find a wrong mix. In fact the more you mix the more interesting the range of colours are invented. I wish we had a full set of Munsell’s colour sphere samples available, because I could demonstrate how all the colours being mixed so far are within a pretty narrow range.

However the debate soon moves on to the other pieces. The paint on un-primed plywood becomes the centre of interest. The student calls this a ’totem’. It started life as a pallet but he soon realised that the marks and paint surfaces were ‘authentic’ or ‘honest’, again we return to these two terms. We all agree that the way these marks are made gives the plywood shape an unselfconscious ‘honesty’. The range of mark qualities is interesting too. From ragged and transparent, to thick and clotted; heavily oiled to dry, chalky marks, where the ply has sucked out the paint’s life.

Finally we wonder if all the various paintings could be treated simply as palettes. The painter always to be working towards an unknown painting that would only come into being once a decision to stop using a painting as a palette was taken. This could ‘renew’ the life of a painting and perhaps be a type of process whereby we could catch it off guard.

The student shows us a drawing he did. A large charcoal drawing about five feet across. A landscape is suggested by a line that wavers horizontally across the centre. Then the line breaks off and becomes engaged very loosely with echoes of the female form. To the top left some scratchy marks next to a ‘sun’ composed of roughly drawn circles, in the centre a charcoal ‘rubbed’ area of grey. It is a very open ‘lyrical’ drawing. I suggest that the control of charcoal comes naturally and that in comparison the paintings are a struggle. We talk about riding a bike. It might take some time to feel comfortable and all of them needed to spend more time with their materials and colour mixing in order to be familiar enough with them for it to become easy. Then, paintings could be as lyrical as this drawing.

Another student starts to show us his work. These paintings are gestural too. Last week he was also at tutorial and was making paintings using large blobs of paint. I had suggested he look at removal as much as application and as the paint was industrial had suggested industrial removal techniques, paint strippers and blow guns. However he has gone off on another tack.

Large paintings on un-stretched and I think un-primed canvas. I stand in front of this and try and mime the marks, the student is left-handed, we consider the marks as the record of a type of ballet. We go back to the characteristics of the marks and colour choice. In this case there are large neutral areas, so I question him on his mixes, he hasn’t really thought about this. Are these perhaps, yellow/violet mixes or green/red or blue/orange? If so what sort of green/red? I introduce the idea of discords. An old debate hovers in the back of my consciousness, but I try and hold it back. Again though what constitutes ‘life’ for a painting is considered.

Eventually we get to the figurative work. Two paintings, both from photographs, one on paper and a larger one on board. The student talks about the emotional content of the initial engagement with photographs. It would appear that painting was a way to heighten the emotional ‘feeling’ tone of the images. Looking at these two images it’s clear that some passages of paint are engaging and lively, whilst others are ‘dead’ and overworked. Most of these passages are around the facial areas and it becomes apparent that in the struggle to get verisimilitude paint becomes tied up and over killed. It is suggested that the student in future tries to work up-side-down. Lots of framing passages of paint is done. By using sheets of white paper, the paintings can be converted into ‘abstracts’. Some of the earlier issues regarding ‘authentic’ marks return and it’s a way of bringing all the painters into a dialogue with the meaning of different paint surfaces.

Finally we return to grounds, applicators, colour mixing and content. Where is content coming from? Is the figurative painting more content rich or not? Above all it is suggested they all need to put hours in learning their trade. Know what grounds can do, know how different types of under-painting change the perception of upper layers, understand why and how different brushes, knives and applicators such as squeegees are used, understand glaze technology, mix paints from scratch, understand how to make shop bought paint have more ‘bite’ by carefully adding pigment etc etc.

Finally students are asked to make a list of doable actions and the session finishes. This is approximately three hours in total, so I have missed out lots of stuff, such as which artists people are looking at. In fact I tend to try and avoid other artists at this stage, as if they have a powerful individual language, this can be so hard to get away from.

The end result is hopefully something usable by everyone. It is though a totally different approach to the 1970s. At one point I did introduce the idea of open and closed forms, not as an illustration of what is right or wrong but simply to give them a bit of language as to how to articulate certain forms and their relationships.

These students have to find an answer. I have no answers for them. I might have thought once that I did but experience tells me that they are more likely to find their own way if they have confidence in themselves and the worst thing I can do is destroy that.

Drawing the face by touch

This was another morning drawing that was an attempt to get different senses working together at the same time. (See also: Steve Reich, rhythm and colour constructions)

Students are asked to work on large sheets of paper, and are asked to make sure they have the ability to extend these in any direction by cutting out extra rectangles and adding them to the initial piece of paper. Everyone is asked to close their eyes and feel their head with the hand they do not use for drawing. Starting at the back, students are asked to think about how the hair gives an initial textural set of information, then asked to press harder they are asked to feel for the bone beneath. One texture replaces another. They are not allowed to take their hand off, but once the back of the head is explored, the top is investigated, then the front, then the sides, some areas being touched several times as the hand makes its way between other sources of information. Students are encouraged to feel inside noses, mouths and ears, to think about how a pair of glasses extends out from the surface of the head or how an earring may suddenly change the textural world.

Then a palette of marks is made, tests and try outs using different media whereby they are trying to make marks that approximate to touched ‘feelings’.

Finally the drawing begins, students are told to forget what a head looks like (this is impossible but the idea is to remind them that this drawing doesn’t need to rely on their memory of what a head looks like), and to begin feeling again before drawing.

Students are encouraged to start at the back of the head, reminding them that when collecting ‘touch’ information, there is no back and front, just a continuous surface. As they start drawing they are to invent surface information as a trace of passage. If they are feeling an ear, how does a mark change from hair, hair over bone to the cave like entry for the finger, then how does the feeling tone shift from open to closed surfaces? Fingers might trace their way across the top of a head and down over the front, moving over one eye and missing another. Alternatively a hand may be moving up from the neck, over the chin and then move left once the mouth is met and go on towards an ear. Fingers may of course explore the inside of the mouth and as this is just a continuous surface, the information continues to just spread over the paper as the student draws.

Questions such as the nature of up-ness and down-ness in a world without sight are asked. Is this drawing now becoming more about distance positioning?  One eye is ten thumb lengths from the other if the feeling is done around the back of the head but only a single thumb length, separated by a nose bridge the other way. How do you know it’s the same eye that you are coming back to? If you were feeling someone else’s head how would the information be encoded? You ‘know’ the fingers have reached the nose, but if you were feeling someone else’s head you might perhaps mistake one area for another.

One thing students are asked to do is to draw a continuous ‘feel’; this is done by drawing a ‘felt’ line that stretches from the back to the front and to the back and to the front again. Starting with perhaps the left ear, the fingers feel over the front of the face (or back), to the right ear, around the back to the left ear again and onwards to the right ear again. If there isn’t enough room on the paper for the marks they can add an extension.

Some students start trying to make the marks very textural by adding perhaps sand or crinkled paper, they are however encouraged to try and make the texture visual, as these are not drawings that will be read by touch.

Finally the drawings are put up to ‘look at’.

Some students were never able to get away from a memory of a head. They force all their marks to make an image that has one side, always the front of the head, eyes always related to a nose in exactly the same way you would get if you saw the head. Others can let go and you get strange spread out images of heads where intimations of ears, noses etc are spread out over a wide area. In the crit students are reminded of the huge size their skin would be if it was flattened out and pinned onto the wall.

I did this at the Swarthmore once and one student really took off, making an image with six noses, five ears and ten eyes, each feature simply drawn as his fingers encountered it, sometimes as his hand come down over the front of his head, and at another time as his fingers moved from the back to the front after exploring the neck. 

As an exercise in exploring synaesthesia it was I thought quite a good one and it’s implications often re-emerged much later in the course when students were making sculpture.  Exhibitions of sculpture for the blind were quite common at the time and there was some debate as to how the work should be done. Was it simply good enough to let blind people touch and feel sculpture? Should sculpture for blind people be constructed specifically as a felt experience?

My thoughts on this overlapped with things I learnt from working with an Indian sculptor who came to work with us at college. (He had a show in the Art Gallery and we hosted him in the ceramics area, which was then on Cookridge Street) He told me about how his teacher made them touch and feel significant sculptural works blindfolded. They had to search out significant form and in particular key points of dynamic change and point them out to the master. These moments were indicated to the students by the master once the blindfolds were removed. Often important form shifts that had been found by touch were not obvious to the eye.

Day two of tutorials

At this point in an artist’s career (round about early 20s) there is a moment where the light goes on. The ‘what is it I’m about’ moment. If you are a painter it’s the time when you have to really go for it, the 'what is it about paint?' becomes a key question for you. You are really wanting to know about where the subject matter is coming from. Several of the tutorials surround these issues. We look at a painting, what makes it ordinary, what aspects are just like anybody else’s painting and what aspects are unique? This isn’t about newness or novelty, it’s about control. The application of the paint might be the first consideration. Often the brush sizes are average, the types of brush ‘off the shelf’ and the variation limited. By looking at just one patch of paint you can open up the dialogue. What sort of brush (knife, hand, rag etc.) would make this mark your own? We consider everything from floor brushes, through badger hair shaving brushes, to made implements. Each mark it is suggested could find its ultimate in some sort of painter’s heaven. Then it’s the surface, paint-mixture itself etc. Finally we talk colour. Why are the colours like they are? I look at the pallet being used and from that you can usually see how much mixing is going on. Usually the colour range is again too ‘ordinary’ and on the one hand ‘local colour’ can be pointed to, (look at the colour of this, that etc. point out tonal reversals, discords etc by looking out the window) and on the other hand ways of thinking around the colour sphere are introduced, anything to get good mixing done and to push the paint into difficult and unknown territory.

Perhaps the painters ought to get together and consider what they need. The college could buy in pigment (I have already spoken to Richard about this and I think he might if we can afford it), if various students wanted to use paint gels, it would be better for them to club together and buy large canisters. Just gel technology can be a whole area to investigate. Soft gels, heavy gels, gloss and matt gel technologies, clear and opaque, granular etc etc both for oil based and acrylic based paints.  As gels range in consistency from brush wash consistency, through pourable to mouldable, they can be used to create glazes, extend paints and change finishes. This technology can then be thought of as an ideas carrier. The medium is the message being applied directly, then slipping off message perhaps and looking at what happens when you use gel as a glue and start adding collage into paint surfaces. It’s a pity the Hughie O'Donoghue exhibition isnt still on at the City Art Gallery, as he used gels in this way and going to look at paintings from the side is always a good way of unpicking how they were done. You can usually tell a painter is in an exhibition, because he or she will be the only person studying the paintings from the edge, trying to mentally unpick the layering.

This type of conversation mirrors others, but the technology changes. A student taking photographs and dealing with light may be asked to consider everything from how the prism works in a single lens reflex camera, to the number of pixels a medium format camera can hold. How film works and how lenses work, how light itself may be analysed scientifically, may be as important as film speed and aperture control. Cable release mechanisms may be explored as well as diffraction, zooming techniques and the nature of reflective and transparent materials. However a concept such has how all this might be applied to ‘a moment of epiphany’ gradually asserts itself into the conversation, so we move from technical issues towards content and meaning.

Problems to solve from the technical possibilities and skills development needed for building figures from glass to the markmaking meanings inherent in industrial paint removal techniques come up during the day.

Other types of issues are also dealt with, from lack of content and how this can be deepened to simply the need to just do things and work from belief or instinct, there is no right approach.

By the end of the day I’m totally drained and can hardly talk, but then I have to do a couple of dissertation tutorials.

I've still not put anything down about the dissertation process and will get round to it soon, but some of the issues are already coming up as I talk to second year students about the underpinning content to their work. If we could start building towards dissertations in year two, the whole process would be much clearer.

Fine Art Year two (One to one tutorials)

Moving to second year or level 5 as it’s called now.

I’ve finished my block of teaching on the first year and now move over to the second year. A totally different set of propositions, as students are now much more focused on developing their own practice. I have done one to one twenty minute tutorials in their workspaces all day. Tiring but it feels like useful time spent.

So what are the issues? Mainly students are worried as to whether they have discovered something that they can get their teeth into; what is it that’s driving them and is it sustainable?

Everyone gives me about five minutes of an introduction to what they are about; then I have to try and dig a little underneath that to make sure I’m not just responding to superficialities.  Most of the time however is pointing towards possibilities. It’s early in the year and the process is about developing on the one hand a focus or driver for the work and on the other opening out possibilities for practical work. Only through work will discoveries be made, but unless as a student you own the process and the reasons for doing it, it will all feel hollow and superficial and won’t be valued. The judgement call is always to do with at what stage of the process they are at. Too much emphasis on craft and the concept might be lost, too much about concept and the making gets lost. Also there are so many different ‘natural’ approaches. Some will be maker/thinkers others concept builders. If you give the wrong advice it gets confusing. Students also have a tendency to worry if they are doing something different to the others. I might think that’s great and try and reinforce this but it can also be about confidence and if people are not ready to go into unknown territory they get lost quickly.

I can’t really give specific examples, but some conversations were entirely technical, such as how to make a variety of pinhole cameras and the technical considerations as to paper, depth of field and use of lens etc. if some of the qualities of camera obscuras or lucidas are to be mimicked others more to do with types of content and how this content can be carried, is it a materials based idea or is it a narrative that needs filming? Sometimes it’s just throwing in another idea or a MacGuffin, (in the sense of an object which forces something to happen or which causes an incident), because I feel that it’s all a bit cosy and safe and if the work is to find something new the situation needs stirring up a little. I don’t do this too often but on a need to do basis at least once a session.

Set times are hard though. Again I understand the need and it ensures all students get equal tutorial time but sometimes I feel the need to take much longer and at other times five minutes is all I need just to throw in a simple question and retire to see the effect.

All the students I spoke to seemed engaged and questioning and only two didn’t turn up. I always think the health of a course can be judged by the numbers of students wanting to be in and using the studios and workshops. The second year feels quite healthy. But perhaps after two days of this I might change my mind.

The paper surface as a taut drum

Awareness of ‘where’ marks lay in terms of the perception of the white space within a drawing or painting was another important area of visual language skills development. This session was designed to sharpen perceptual visual awareness and was usually hosted by Patrick Oliver.

Taking a clean sheet of A1 cartridge students were asked to stare at it carefully. Patrick would ask, “Where was the surface? Did it seem to open out into a deep space, or did you become more aware of the paper itself as an object?”

After a moment for reflection students were asked to make a mark.  Patrick would go on, “Make a mark that sits exactly one inch below the surface of the paper. Adjust it until it does this. Once you are satisfied that has been done, now make another mark. Does this sit in front of or behind the first mark? Adjust this mark so that it sits exactly on the surface”.

Once this had been achieved students could make a third mark, this could be in a position determined by themselves, but had to be decided upon carefully and then adjusted towards this very accurately. Of course what happened was that all the marks would then need to be readjusted, as any new mark, either sent the others backwards or forwards. Then a period of staring again, students being asked to make small further adjustments as Patrick moved around between them and pointed out that a particular mark was too far forward or back.

About an hour was spent on this activity. Sometimes just using black (charcoal, pencil and chalk, with erasure) and white, at other times using colour as well.

This was very hard to do and I was aware that some students who had already got the idea of adjustment, started to rub marks out and put them back in again, the faint haze of rubbing out, settling a mark into the surface much more easily than the unadjusted first try. However it was a very useful thing to do and did get students looking much more closely at what was happening on the paper. In my own mind, I tended to link this to a particular personal understanding of atmospheric perspective. Sharp energetic dark marks move forward when compared to less energetic soft light marks, especially if the soft light marks are smaller than the sharp dark marks. Therefore the four qualities of mark energy, softness/sharpness, lightness/darkness, together with size constancy, could be adjusted to create a controlled space. Patrick would tell me that this was too ‘illustrative’ a reading and that it wasn’t as simple as this, you just had to ‘look’. 

Patrick 1974 Foundation party

The structure of the Foundation Course

From my posts so far you might get the idea that the Foundation course just consisted of one off sessions but in fact these were just a small part of what was going on and were mainly done during the first term, before Christmas. Morning drawings were only for the first hour of the day, designed to get brains working and the rest of the day would be a return to whatever the main preoccupation was.

In the early days we had a lot more freedom as the course offered a Jacob Kramer College Certificate on completion and it didn’t have to conform to a BTEC or other examination format. This meant that we could make things up as we went along, each year trying out something new and looking for alternative ways to pack a lot of learning into a short period of time.

Some things however were constant. The beginning of the year would usually start with drawing, colour and then 3D. Ofter this (roughly 6 weeks in) would be a period of diagnostic work, consisting of projects designed to test out how students approached various problem solving and other activities. After Christmas there was usually a breakdown into separate areas, initially Fine Art, Fashion Textiles, Graphics and 3D. (When I started this was very informal, students working towards different disciplines often working alongside each other, if I can remember rightly we only started to break down into geographically separate discipline areas by about 1980, partly due to increasing numbers, but also because degree courses were indicating that portfolios needed to become more identifiable as fine art or design). Portfolios had to be ready for Easter in those days, so you had a lot more time as a student to develop your own work and establish an identity. The final term was focused on pushing individual work forward and as there were only two degree course choices and the ‘pool’ to apply for; many students were also still developing their portfolio for interview throughout the third term. (It was much harder to get a place on a degree programme then, courses often keeping half their places open for second stage interviews, as it was commonly felt that students would have a much more ‘mature’ portfolio by then and therefore less ‘risky’). The final show at the end of the year was always a big event and much time was spent organising and putting this up. The move towards an August start came with a change in degree application processes. The old ADAR (Art and Design Admissions Registry) was phased out and replaced by UCAS. The number of art and design courses that could be applied for started to multiply exponentially and by then all Foundation Courses had been validated under various examining bodies, usually BTEC.

This blog format is great for off the top of the head reminiscence but rubbish in terms of giving a structured and coherent overview of what happened, so I’m sorry if it is confusing. I shall gradually open out the differences as I remember them, but things do blur as time goes by and I never kept any records. However other people have and perhaps at some point some of the records might be added to these thoughts as more objective indicators of what actually went on.

Terry Hammill was course leader for several of those (for me) early years, (Peter Smailes was leader when I arrived, but he was always rather distant and I was never sure how much he was involved with structuring, others seemed to have strong views of their own and he just seemed to let them get on with it). Terry held the reins sometimes loosely and at other times quite tightly, looking for when we were losing it and making sure we addressed the totality and not just the bits we were interested in. There was a sense of camaraderie, a strong belief in what we were doing and a feeling that we were all valued for our contributions, even though some were more vocal than others in ‘knowing’ what it was all about. (There were times when clashes between personalities and approaches to pedagogy would get extremely vociferous and argumentative) It needed a calm head and logical mind to balance the subjective excitement and romantic tales with the need to cover the basics and ensure that at the end of the day the course did what it was supposed to do. Terry will have the paper records from those times and at some point they ought to be archived.

Recycling old drawings

The big studio on the top floor of Vernon Street housed about 70 students. (This was circa 1980s, Foundation was to grow and grow until at one time it reached 300, I think its now about 250 students) As we did morning drawings every morning lots of trials and starts and simply poor drawings would gradually accumilate around the edges of the studio as students tended to discard them, but not actually throw them away. (There is an issue here over how much students actually valued the activity) 
These dirty, (often covered in smudges of charcoal) crumpled pieces of A1 cartridge would at some point become the focus for another morning drawing, one designed to introduce a very old idea about stimulating the imagination, but which also always seemed to trigger a debate over the use of certain approaches to image making.
Students were asked to find an old discarded drawing, (it could not be one of their own, it had to one they had no vested interest in) they then had to flatten it out and rub some charcoal into it to emphasise the folds and crumple.  They were now allowed to make marks across the drawing using any techniques available, but to do this without looking at the images or trying to be ‘arty’ by making a composition or trying to work-up the existing drawing.
Leonardo had advocated the contemplation of  stained walls , “In order to excite the mind,…find in them mountain landscapes, trees, battles and faces.” Cozens had elaborated on this during the 18^th century with his ‘A New Method for Assisting the Invention in Drawing Original Compositions of Landscape (1786) his 'blots' were designed as stimuli for the invention of landscapes, he sometimes suggesting crumpling the paper before a blot was started in order to produce a greater variety of accidental shapes.
Students were introduced to these historical precedents and then told that they had to find images within these now ‘historically stained’ pieces of paper. The tools of choice were an eraser and white paint. Removal was the key to discovery. As images were ‘dug out’ they could then if needed be reinforced or clarified with whatever media was appropriate. Unfortunately students’ responses to these crumpled pieces of cartridge paper were sometimes treated as if they were responses to rorschach ink blots.  There was a tendency when we looked at the images to attempt to use them to perform some sort of amateur psychoanalysis. Looking at this in hindsight it may have been really traumatic for some sensitive young person, but at the time it seemed OK and part of the diagnostic process. However leaving that issue aside, perhaps more important was the discussion that often arose in relation to closed and open forms and centralised and de-centralised images.
As the students’ drawings developed there tended to be two basic differences in the way imagery would be uncovered and these differences would be focused on in the crit.  Students either started to carve out a centralised single image or discovered a series of small images distributed around the A1 sheet.   They also either started to ‘work-up’ the discoveries in order to realise them, or still kept them integrated into the ground by responding to the mark surface as a whole rather than removing the surface and replacing it with another.
There might be 3 or 4 different staff that would wade into the crit and their contributions were usually indicative of their own interests.
One dialogue centered on the differences between 3D and 2D thinkers. If a student had found an image and had started to completely remove the rest of the surface marks, the resulting work was usually picked out as demonstrating an interest in the ‘centralised image’.  This it was often argued demonstrated a strong 3D interest, as the student was attempting to dig the image out and wasn’t naturally interested in the paper surface. (Clement Greenberg still held a hidden sway over many of the debates at that time).  The sculptors on the staff would perhaps argue for its merits, whilst the painters would now point towards an image that still had coherence and connection to the whole surface; the de-centralised image now being promoted. What was seen as best practice if it was a painterly sensibility that was being looked for, was also a prevalence of open forms. These were forms that allowed the eye to keep moving. It was argued that closed forms got the eye stuck in one place and you couldn’t read the image as a whole. 
The illustrator/painter debate would also come up. The more someone had worked up their image the more it could ‘fall out’ of the totality and this was seen as a tendency to be illustrative rather than ‘responsive’ to the needs of the surface; the illustrator tending to ‘trap’ the eyes and therefore fall into the ‘fault’ of freezing the image and not therefore giving it ‘life’. This is an issue that has come up before.  Energy and life were seen as vital to an image’s value. In order to have this energy, the eyes must be in constant movement, so if for instance a form had no visual way out (such as a perfect circle, hence Thubron’s squared circles) there was something wrong. A drawing of a face could suffer the same problem therefore you would not have a defining outside line or edge, as the energy could not flow out into the space around it. (There is no such thing as a line in nature).
Looking back on the arguments now, I can see that these debates must have put several students off. Potential illustrators seeing their drawings dismissed as being lifeless and sculptors and painters being miss-diagnosed. Perhaps the main thing about this session was making sure old drawings were re-cycled, the need for sustainability hadn’t yet reared its head, (hence all students working on A1) and the amount of wasted paper was a crime.
On the other hand students could see from the arguments that staff had very different standpoints and reasons for picking out work and perhaps this helped get over the ‘looking to please’ issue. Less confident students often wanting to know what the answer was. I suppose one answer was, “It depends on who you talk to”.
I was also working at the Swarthmore at this time, so I was very aware that Molly Lord ran a landscape painting adult education class that centred on staining papers with ragged oil paint and then getting her students to find a landscape within the morass of marks. Molly was seen by some as a bit of an oddball, not really a professional but I was impressed by her and thought her own paintings were pretty good. At one time she had a toy telephone that she kept in her bag and used to occasionally ‘answer’ it. Slightly odd but somehow endearing.